Articles by Sydney Lea

Before Malcolm’s funeral got started,I stood talking with John the blacksmith, who told meHe’d been spending some pretty hard hoursWith a pair of two-year-old Friesian maresWho’d never had their feet trimmed.In a flash, I thought of a feral donkeyIn Ireland, back thirty years,

Poor animal, lowly mount of the Christ,Hobbling on hooves long as breadloaves.This had nothing whatever to do with Malcolm,But somehow it did, as it happened.Malcolm had once pronounced me as husband.A wonder. I’d gotten the girl,More than the clumsy hero can fathom

When it crops up in sappy movies.So Malcolm is part of a long, joyful marriage,And the family it made, includingThe children he baptized. One readingCame from a funny noteHe’d left for the pastor, which said in part:“Non-judgment day is coming,

Beware.” I could virtually feel Malcolm’s voice,Insisting as ever that GodWas too big to conform to anyone’s will.There was no one so evil or illTo have strayed beyond the Lord’s grace, he claimed.He was frumpy and funny but mostlyJust good. An accomplished athlete as well,

Improbably fierce on the courts,Although he loved his every opponent,He’d wanted his ashes interredIn a tennis-ball can. It might seem absurdThat I conjured horse or burro,But as we mourners chuckled and wept,I imagined I heard soft words,Malcolm’s, and knew his hand would have stroked

Those neglected, suffering creatures.That funeral day, for all who were there,Was so painful I’d almost swearIt hurt them to stand on God’s green earth.For my part at least I wishedI could somehow walk for a while on air.

Tiny, almost an anti-weight,if it blew off my palm in the wind I might not even notice.Dashing against the back porch glass,the bird fell onto logs I’d stacked there, or rather heaped.I loaded our wood more neatly out in the shedbut this jumble of lumber reminded memy life lacked grace.

Wind didn’t kill the bird but misprision.My oldest daughter had just given birth to twins,and I was thinking of them of coursewhen I saw the sparrow. We’re in a hopeful season.I’d like to imagine new beginnings,not ponder for instance the self-styled Christian WarriorsI heard about lately, devoted to killing police,

to launching Armageddon.They claim these are days of Antichrist,and I could almost agree—for other reasons.Thou shalt not murder is among the Commandments,I’d remind the warriors,all nine of whom live in Michigan,a place near hell in this near Depression.

Days are bad worldwide,though in gospel God’s eye takes in the smallest sparrow.Vile hooligans among us stormover having a president who’s other than white.We’re all human, and none of us saved,and—as the old Greek said—it might have been best if we’d never been born.

And yet to imagine a world devoid of hopeis too easy and lazy, I decide.Outside the odors of spring fly in on the wind:damp mulch, old ice, wet mud and sap.The sugar-makers hope for a few more gallons, hope for a few more years, to be with my children.I open the stove, sweep the bird in.

He awakens on February first, stunned again by that oddwonder: how quickly old has come. Of course if his will were donehe’d have risen youthful, but age is here, he’ll own it. He thanks God

for its coming without companion pain, without reliance on medicine.As he has since he was younger, he puts on snowshoes and clambers overdrifts and up a daunting bluff. As much by determination

as muscle he powers on through the powder. The view from here—a blessing:eastward the white White Mountains all seem to be staring placidly down onice-dams hunched in the river. He kicks his feet out of leather bindings

to climb a tree. West, a neighbor’s strange herd of alpacas mills,all wool, though mere months back—short-shorn, with feeble reeds for necks—they were fragile creatures, naked, susceptible, silly, same as us all.

He forces air out through his teeth—birdwatcher trick—and imagines a lispingcloud, his sounds small jets of steam. Let kinglets come, he dreams.Did an eagle shriek? Too far to tell. But golden-crowned kinglets are flying

from his south to land all around, on his limb and all the way up to the crown,then are gone so quickly he all but missed the marvel: the kinglets come.

The smile on your mouth was the deadest thingAlive enough to have the strength to die. —“Neutral Tones”(Psalm 72))

It won’t last long, this snow that sheathes the dooryard pine in April and laysits feckless cover on the slope behind. Crocuses, just tall enough,poke their small blue noses through. It’s clear that they’re alive enough to live.April’s gale is loud as bombers. What’s left of ice around the pondin town is rough as predators’ teeth. The fisher fells the luckless squirrel.

There’s much I too may try to cover. For all of that I feel a gladnessin watching this omni-inclusive white blot out the neutral tones that pushedour brilliant poet to ponder death, and love’s deceit, its cruelty.We’ve been together, my love and I, near three decades, which have scudded bylike these sideways flakes. My lover-wife. There can come pangs, but the freshets have started

to wander the brush and make their signs: soon we’ll find the trillium,the painted kind, in that secret place which I discovered springs ago,and which since then I’ve kept a secret from all but her—from even our children;and the valley’s white-faced Herefords, while winter endured, dropped new calves,which now, though mud clots up like blood, shine clean as a man’s most colorful dream.

What is this one’s dream? That life go on as ever. That all our lives go on.No more than dream, of course. I know, the planet heating up, the cretinpoliticians waving swords, as if, by counter-logic, warmight transform earth into something more saintly. So many hard facts conspire against me.To know that, though, is to make me cling the harder to gifts that appear to be given

without my having to deserve them. Flowers, beasts, the glinting trees.My disposition, which has moved me here to mute dispute with my great better,in spite of all my darker doubt. Inkling that something will soon come downlike rain upon the mown grass, as showersthat water the earth. Let us praise the Lord,and every weather. Or the smile on the mouth of my lover, which still can blind like snow.

Or the road agent waving from his bright-red plow as it smooths the mud-clotted back lanes over.

After the tourist’s two blue insomniac nights,patrols of all that had been lost, botched, or sweetbut severed, during the Albinoni he went off,up, away, so that, say, the sudden recallof his late mother in grainy portrait in her yearbook,over the captions: “brightest,” and—in the quaint patoisof the gentry during their Depression—“most attractive,”and the despair she may have felt as children and alcoholsupervened: if any such feckless maunderingoccurred to him . . . Well, off, up and away went sheas well, borne heavenward on the andante’s strains.Two trumpets. One great organ. Peace might well lie at hand.Peace was at hand. During Martini’s toccata in C,

a vision of his tall naked wife, under a tall naked sun,produced in him in the church a subtle stirring, evena mild tumescence, which he would otherwise have describedas out of order, were it not that this newer order archedso beyond any scheme he’d normally posit that within it all thingswere possible, as they are, it is said, with God, Whoduring the Manfredini revealed Himself to our touristin what he construed as His human form, His prison garbstained and rent, His savaged body hefted by menand women—their countenances looking more angry than mournful—from a loud place like that bar on the corner of Thakurovaand Evropska, which he had walked by that evening on his wayto transport: the Metro, which carried him into this old quarter

in a car along with that beauteous, amorous young Czech couplewith their red-tipped white staffs and whited eyes,then spilled him out to rumpsteak with garlic, alone, and thento the 9 p.m. concert, alone. During the Ave Mariaof Schubert, he saw a joy he hadn’t seen in the tearsof St. Peter as rendered faceforth by an artist, Swiss of all things,unknown to him till that forenoon in the Castle gallery.The wailing weanling calves of his childhood now placidly grazed.The famous small songbirds lit on the outstretched arms of Francis.Peter’s tears had appeared only woeful this morning. The hour of musicconcluded, the tourist walked, though it felt still like soaring,his cobblestone-wearied heels devoid of any pain,back into this world, broken and joyous and praying,

“Never to be the same.” Never perhaps again.

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